Back in 2004, I send out a little essay on post-election reflections that several folks passed around (by e-mail, back in those pre-Facebook days). In 2008 I sent another, more hopeful post-election message; and I guess I'm making it a tradition now.

One bit of good news, looking back at that 2004 message, is how the landscape has shifted on the question of marriage equality. In that election, gay marriage was used to as a hot-button issue to get right-wing voters to the polls. But today I stand as a proud citizen of one of the first states to have its electorate affirm the civil marriage rights of same-sex couples, as Maryland voters approved Question 6. Hooray!

So it all comes down to Ohio -- the state that GOP ratfuckers seem to have stolen in 2004. Ohio uses computerized voting machines. This year the software on those machines is not only not trustworthy (none of them are -- trustworthy software must be open source software -- see Karen Sandler's talk I posted yesterday), but is apparently not legal. Ergo, odds are good that Ohio will not have a legal or reliable election today.

Oh, boy.

Is Ohio voting software vulnerable to fraud? Court to hear Election Day case. (The Christian Science Monitor)

A local candidate says a crucial piece of Ohio vote-tallying software was not properly vetted by the state and could be hacked. A judge will hear to case on Election Day and decide whether to grant an injunction against use of the software Tuesday.

Well, this is interesting, and busts some sterotypes. From Dean Ahamd, Libertarian candidate for Maryand's Senate seat: Islam and Libertarianism are a Good Fit (MuslimMatters.org)

...the Qurʾānic verse is an endorsement of the fundamental principle of libertarianism, the Nonaggression Principle. This principle is articulated in the Maryland Libertarian Party Constitution (of which I am co-author): “No person or group has the right to initiate force or fraud against any other person or group to seek to attain their values.” This common sense principle is accepted by everyone in their daily lives, except for murderers, thieves, and con artists.

Software has become a matter of life-and-death for some people. And that will only increase as we become more reliant on technology. Shouldn't we have the ability to inspect and modify that software? Listen to Karen Sandler's speech Freedom from my heart to the desktop.

The state of our "democracy" is so bad that Russia -- Russia! Putin-land! -- can fire some legitimate zingers at us. Sure, it's all about distracting Russian voters from their own countries' problems; but then, our corporate media's coverage of Russia's problems does a good job of distracting us from talking about our slide into plutocracy, doesn't it?

Russia skewers US election as undemocratic, ‘the worst in the world’:

The Russian government is lambasting the U.S. presidential race as an undemocratic spectacle amid growing concerns about the country’s own commitment to free and fair elections.

Over the past week or so you've probably heard at least mention of the 50th anniversary of the Cuban Missile Crisis, back in October 1962. (The U.S. naval blockade continued well into Novemember, but the crisis is generally considered to have ended when Kennedy , Khrushchev, and U Thant reached an agreement.)

But a little known detail of the crisis is the role of Vasili Arkhipov, regarded by many as The Man Who Saved The World. If you like living on a world that isn't a radioactive wasteland, take a moment to thank Vasili, whose vote was the only thing that kept the Soviet submarine B-59 from launching a 15 kiloton nuclear torpedo in response to bombardment by depth charges from the USS Beale. In all likelyhood such a nuclear torpedo launch would have triggered outright nuclear war.

I missed commemorating the October 27 anniversary of his world-saving veto, but I think I'll hoist a glass of vodka tonight in his honor.

As you may have heard, Mitt Romney and his surrogates have been making false claims about Chrysler moving production of its iconic Jeep line from the U.S. to China. This has pulled Chrysler execs into the political area.

The only Chrysler I ever owned was a Dodge Colt, which was really a Mitsubishi and was not an impressive car in any respect. I had no plans to ever own one again. But this simple tweet from Ralph Gilles, Chrysler's head of product design for Chrysler, in reply to the execrable Donald Trump spreading the Jeep lie, has at least doubled the chance I might buy one someday:

@realDonaldTrump you are full of shit!

The latest installment of Cops Gone Wild: Boy 'Recklessly' Tasered After He Refused To Wash Cop's Car: Lawsuit Says

The officer reportedly asked a group of boys who wanted to clean his patrol unit, the lawsuit said. The boy, identified as "R.D." in the complaint, said he didn't want to.

Webb allegedly pointed his Taser at the boy and said, "Let me show you what happens to people who do not listen to the police."

According to the suit, he then shot "two barbs into R.D.'s chest." The shock hit the boy with 50,000 volts into his body, causing the boy to temporarily lose consciousness and leaving with scarring from the Taser's barbs, according to the suit.

...

The Smoking Gun reports that, in a memo to supervisors, Webb said he had removed the Taser cartridge before showing the device to a group of kids earlier that day, then he forgot that he reloaded it before Tasing the boy.

Democracy Corps (Stan Greenberg and James Carville's outfit) claims that polling results can be radically different when cell phone users -- usually left out of polls -- are included: Cell phones: why we think Obama will win the popular vote, too.

Voters reached on cell phones are not only more likely to vote for Obama, they are attitudinally and culturally distinct. They are less conservative but not perhaps more libertarian – giving both the NRA and gay marriage very favorable ratings.

Of course, we know those reached on cell phones are much younger and speaking to them on cell phones is obviously a precondition for getting their vote preference right. But cell phones are also critical to representing the new diversity of the American electorate. Those reached on cell are 29 percent minority...

At her blog Infotropism, Alex “Skud” Bayley posts about what Silicon Valley is doing to our civilization, and why she still doesn’t want to work for Google.

Since I’ve been out of the Silicon-Valley-centred tech industry, I’ve become increasingly convinced that it’s morally bankrupt and essentially toxic to our society. Companies like Google and Facebook — in common with most public companies — have interests that are frequently in conflict with the wellbeing of — I was going to say their customers or their users, but I’ll say “people” in general, since it’s wider than that. People who use their systems directly, people who don’t — we’re all affected by it, and although some of the outcomes are positive a disturbingly high number of them are negative: the erosion of privacy, of consumer rights, of the public domain and fair use, of meaningful connections between people and a sense of true community, of beauty and care taken in craftsmanship, of our very physical wellbeing. No amount of employee benefits or underfunded Google.org projects can counteract that.